Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow Your Mind New York Comic Con Stranger Things. Yes,
Speaker 1: it all comes together on October six, from seven pm
Speaker 1: to eight thirty pm at Hudson Mercantile in Manhattan. If
Speaker 1: you're in the area, join us for Stuff to Blow
Speaker 1: Your Mind Live Stranger Science as we explore the exciting
Speaker 1: science and tantalizing pseudo science underlying the hit Netflix show
Speaker 1: Stranger Things. Stuff you missed in history class has a
Speaker 1: show right after us in the same venue, so you
Speaker 1: can really double down on your stuff. You do not
Speaker 1: have to have a New York Comic Con badge to attend.
Speaker 1: It is a separately ticketed event, and hey, the three
Speaker 1: of us would love to meet you. This is the
Speaker 1: opportunity to do it. Learn more and buy your tickets
Speaker 1: at New York Comic Con dot com slash n y
Speaker 1: C C hyphen presents Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your
Speaker 1: Mind from how Stuff Works dot com. Hey you wasn't
Speaker 1: Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lawn
Speaker 1: and my name is Christian Sager, and I made a
Speaker 1: mistake this summer. Oh yeah, I decided it would be
Speaker 1: a good idea to reread Stephen King's It over the
Speaker 1: course of the summer in preparation of the new film
Speaker 1: that just came out. How's that a mistake? That's a
Speaker 1: that's a that's a fat book. But a good one
Speaker 1: it was, and I was very happy with having read it,
Speaker 1: but obviously my nightmare quota filled up rather quickly. Uh.
Speaker 1: And there are some really disturbing stuff in that book
Speaker 1: that uh isn't really an either film version, but they're
Speaker 1: definitely percolating up here in the old brain noggin. Yeah,
Speaker 1: there is quite a bit of traumatizing material in that book.
Speaker 1: It's been a long time since I've read it, but yeah,
Speaker 1: there are certain things that that stand out to me today. Now.
Speaker 1: Of course, we had that that mini series based on
Speaker 1: Stephen King's It Comcourage that the day before I went
Speaker 1: and saw the new movie too, so I've had a
Speaker 1: full IT experience this summer. Awesome. Yeah, I mean the
Speaker 1: mini series was was was fun for the time, very flawed,
Speaker 1: but you had a wonderful performance by Tim Curry. Tim
Speaker 1: Curry nails in them playing penny Wise, the dancing clown,
Speaker 1: one of the many terrifying forms of this extra dimensional,
Speaker 1: fear eating, child killing monstrosity. Right. Yeah, and then you
Speaker 1: had what Oh, John Boy was in it. That's right,
Speaker 1: John Boy was Bill down Burrow, John Ritters in it. Uh,
Speaker 1: what's his name from Night Court? Yeah, Harry Harry Anderson
Speaker 1: plays Ritchie. But I was gonna say Richard Major from
Speaker 1: the Thing isn't as Stan grown up Stan. Yeah, there's
Speaker 1: an amazing scene in the in the old mini series
Speaker 1: where he is a severed head inside a mini fridge
Speaker 1: talking to everybody. It's it's played for laughs, but it's
Speaker 1: pretty funny. And of course this year were two thousand seventeen,
Speaker 1: we just had this magnificent adaptation of at least the
Speaker 1: first half of the novel. Yeah, and and I just
Speaker 1: saw it the other night, Sunday night actually, and I
Speaker 1: thought it was terrific me too. I saw it as well,
Speaker 1: and I was grinning ear to ear because it's very
Speaker 1: rare one that you get a good horror movie and
Speaker 1: two that you get a good Stephen King adaptation. And
Speaker 1: this was I just coming off the heels of the
Speaker 1: Dark Tower movie. This was this was spectacular because that
Speaker 1: Dark Tower movie was a little disappointing. Yeah. My only
Speaker 1: gripe about this latest hit movie is we didn't have
Speaker 1: a nice, cheesy Stephen King cameo. That's right. I know,
Speaker 1: I forgot about that. Yeah, he used to do all this.
Speaker 1: Has he done those lately though he's not like stan Lee,
Speaker 1: but he used to in the eighties and the nineties.
Speaker 1: I think he's done some for television. I thought I
Speaker 1: saw something on his Twitter the other day where he's
Speaker 1: doing Okay. Yeah, it's always fun to catch him, all right.
Speaker 1: So obviously we're fans of it. We're we're fans of
Speaker 1: of both adaptations. So we thought, hey, everybody's it crazy
Speaker 1: right now? The films just performing like gangbusters out there,
Speaker 1: So why don't we do an episode on the science
Speaker 1: of it? And you know why, because it's October and
Speaker 1: what do we do in October and stuff to blow
Speaker 1: your mind? All Halloween theme topics, That's right. So we
Speaker 1: are this is the beginning of our bonanza for four
Speaker 1: weeks of doing topics on things not not necessarily it'll
Speaker 1: scare you, but that are related to horror or the season. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we keep it seasonal to the point that we're actually
Speaker 1: shoehorning material into September or postponing it until November, just
Speaker 1: so we can focus on Halloween. Al Right, So in
Speaker 1: this episode, We're just gonna lay out a few sort
Speaker 1: of ground rules for everybody, so you know what we're
Speaker 1: gonna do, what we're not going to do. First of all,
Speaker 1: if you're wary of spoilers, we're not going to get
Speaker 1: into like really hard spoilers. But we are going to
Speaker 1: talk about characteristics of the novel of of the movie,
Speaker 1: especially so you know, if you want to go in
Speaker 1: just knowledgeless, uh, then maybe skip this episode and come back. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I mean, I would say, like if you've seen any
Speaker 1: of our other monster science videos or episodes, like the
Speaker 1: stuff that Robert and I have done on like zombies
Speaker 1: or vampires, or the the science of the vampires from
Speaker 1: the Strain, things like that, Like, for the most part,
Speaker 1: we don't get into spoiler territory or deep plot details.
Speaker 1: It's mainly about like how the monster works and then
Speaker 1: how real life science applies to it. And likewise, we're
Speaker 1: also not going to get into some of the more
Speaker 1: esoteric stuff that is in the books but isn't necessarily
Speaker 1: in the films. Right, right, So I want to start
Speaker 1: off with a revelation. My grandfather was a clown. Good
Speaker 1: for you, He was actually a doctor, but he was
Speaker 1: also a clown like his thing was as a member
Speaker 1: of the Shriners, he and a neighbor of his would
Speaker 1: dress up like clowns and perform as clowns at various
Speaker 1: hospitals or children's centers and at the circule us. And
Speaker 1: I remember as a young kid going to the circus
Speaker 1: and seeing my grandfather, I'll clowned up horsing around down
Speaker 1: there on the stage and entertaining people. And so I
Speaker 1: have some sympathy for Pennywise, but I also understand what
Speaker 1: makes Pennywise so creepy. Well, I think one thing to
Speaker 1: keep in mind with with Pennywise is that Stephen King
Speaker 1: wrote this book really ahead of the full blown creepy
Speaker 1: crunk clown culture, and certainly it played a part in
Speaker 1: developing that culture. But I don't really blame King as
Speaker 1: much for it, because the whole gimmick here is that
Speaker 1: this awful creature from another dimension wants to take on
Speaker 1: a pleasing form in order to lure kids in, and
Speaker 1: then it also like manipulates that in terrorizing them. So
Speaker 1: it makes sense that it would pick something you know,
Speaker 1: pure and innocent and fun, the clown, yeah, right, rather
Speaker 1: than like my little pony Yeah, like, if it were
Speaker 1: operating today, the thing is probably would not use the clown,
Speaker 1: would probably use something like, you know, a character from
Speaker 1: Dinosaur Train or something, because kids is today have been
Speaker 1: sort of generationally poisoned against the clown. They they haven't
Speaker 1: grown up in the age of the clown. They've grown
Speaker 1: up in the age of the creepy clown. And unless
Speaker 1: you were going out of your way to foster an
Speaker 1: appreciation for clowns, uh, then they're probably just not gonna
Speaker 1: have it. Yeah, it's true, and I'm sure you're aware
Speaker 1: of this, but there's been this backlash from actual clowns
Speaker 1: who are saying, like, this movie is going to make
Speaker 1: it harder for me to earn a living as a clown.
Speaker 1: And it's kind of like, guys, I think it's maybe
Speaker 1: more than the movie. I think, as Robert said, the
Speaker 1: age of the clown is maybe coming to an end, right, Uh,
Speaker 1: because we waged war against it and killed it. Like
Speaker 1: there was this thing that was it was innocent and fun,
Speaker 1: and as a culture we couldn't help but tear it
Speaker 1: to pieces. And we have to address this right up
Speaker 1: at the top. This is what we're referring to is
Speaker 1: color phobia, which is the fear of clowns, the supposed
Speaker 1: not really. Robert has covered this, uh in many venue. Uh.
Speaker 1: We have a stuff to blow your mind video that's
Speaker 1: all about this that you did, gosh four years ago maybe. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then there's a blog post in our site about
Speaker 1: it as well. But let's just get it out of
Speaker 1: the way, because it's what most viewers and commentators of
Speaker 1: it are talking about right now. Um. So, okay, the
Speaker 1: behavior of clowns is unpredictable in their body movements are
Speaker 1: wild and exaggerated. So obviously that's something that can kind
Speaker 1: of freak you out right. Uh. And in fact, they
Speaker 1: nailed that with Pennywise in the movie. I thought, like
Speaker 1: the the way that they had his body contortant, unusual ways,
Speaker 1: I think really worked. Well. Yeah, I mean, but it
Speaker 1: was it was not necessarily clownish, it was exaggerated. The
Speaker 1: point where it was it was it was grote is monstrous. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1: According though to author John G. Robertson, the term corephobia
Speaker 1: is almost certainly a product of pop culture and the
Speaker 1: Internet and isn't actually in any of the expected litter
Speaker 1: narture on phobias. So this is like one of those
Speaker 1: things that's it's great to talk about on the internet,
Speaker 1: but it's not something that like a psychiatrist is actually
Speaker 1: going to diagnose you with. It's probably not in the
Speaker 1: D S M. Yeah, you know, I think by and large, yes,
Speaker 1: a child can be scared by a clown, no question. Uh.
Speaker 1: A grown up can have maybe even dramatic memories of clowns.
Speaker 1: But this idea of like there's this widespread phobia of clowns,
Speaker 1: you know, I I tend to be very skeptical of that. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I think part of it, and you addressed this
Speaker 1: in both of your pieces, is that for the last
Speaker 1: couple of decades, we've had this plethora of scary clown imagery,
Speaker 1: not just Pennywise from the book, in the mini series
Speaker 1: and now this big movie, but you've got killer clowns
Speaker 1: from outer Space, You've got the real life story of
Speaker 1: John Wayne Gacy. Right, there's just all of this stuff
Speaker 1: floating around that kind of makes clowns sinister. What's the
Speaker 1: House of a Thousand Corpses? Right? His clowns? Yeah? Oh yeah,
Speaker 1: he just came out with the whole clown movie, didn't he.
Speaker 1: I forgot about that. Yeah. Uh so but there is
Speaker 1: a study. It's a two study at the University of
Speaker 1: Sheffield that was published in Nursing Standard, and they found
Speaker 1: that out of two hundred and fifty children, most kids
Speaker 1: who were ages four to sixteen dislike clown imagery. Big surprise.
Speaker 1: So what's the lesson here, Well, okay, they said, maybe
Speaker 1: we shouldn't have clowns in hospitals anymore, especially because those
Speaker 1: are places where kids are unsettled and scared. So if
Speaker 1: my grandfather were still alive, I'd have to say to him,
Speaker 1: like me, you might want to lay off the whole
Speaker 1: clown thing. This is why in children's hospital it's so
Speaker 1: funny that Rob Cordrey is always in clown makeup. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well then that's that sort of adds. They don't go
Speaker 1: straight up with the creepy clown on that show, but
Speaker 1: they do kind of toy with it a little. Well,
Speaker 1: he's always got he's always got clown makeup on. But
Speaker 1: then like his um smock, I guess you would call
Speaker 1: it is always covered with blood as if as if
Speaker 1: he just got out of surgery. Well, so here's something
Speaker 1: I do want to point out, and that is, Uh,
Speaker 1: first of all, I think a lot even perhaps even
Speaker 1: the study. I don't have to study in front of me,
Speaker 1: so I can't speak to it specifically. But I think
Speaker 1: when people talk about fear of clowns, even if they're
Speaker 1: not bringing to mind creepy clown imagery, like overtly purposefully
Speaker 1: creepy clowns, they are bringing to mind certain clowns. They're
Speaker 1: bringing to mind like a certain um, you know, archetype
Speaker 1: of the you know, the full white makeup, red hair,
Speaker 1: kind of a bose of the clown or a pennywise appearance.
Speaker 1: And there's it's not really fair to reduce all clowning
Speaker 1: traditions to that. Like there's there's a rich tradition of
Speaker 1: clowning that spreads across cultures. In many cases these were
Speaker 1: these are sacred traditions, um, you know, especially when you
Speaker 1: look to various Native American customs like the gesture of
Speaker 1: the clown, the fool, these are culturally important figures. Also,
Speaker 1: the whole idea of like the Carnivalesque in in Europe
Speaker 1: being sort of an active resistance the Comedia del arte,
Speaker 1: that something along those lines, Right, there's a long history
Speaker 1: behind all this. Oh yeah, and like if you go
Speaker 1: to say a CIRCUSLA show, you'll see a lot of
Speaker 1: a lot more modern takes on clowning. And I have
Speaker 1: to say, as far as hospitals go, uh, my my
Speaker 1: son was in in the children's healthcare center here in
Speaker 1: Atlanta a few years back, and I did see some
Speaker 1: clowns making the rounds and they did not look like
Speaker 1: Bozo Pennywise clowns. They were they were using very light
Speaker 1: clown makeup, they were using musical instruments, and it was
Speaker 1: it was just kind of a delightful thing for the children.
Speaker 1: So I do think that criticisms of clowns and discussions
Speaker 1: of fear of clowns, it doesn't always take into account
Speaker 1: the rich variety of clowning out there. Well, here's an
Speaker 1: alternative theory, okay, And you actually presented this, but you
Speaker 1: paired it with a nice bit of academic research. There's
Speaker 1: a clinical psychology professor named Paul Salkov Skiss, and he
Speaker 1: points out that children in general are far more susceptible
Speaker 1: to extraordinary and unusual imagery. Right, So you then offered
Speaker 1: this that it let's compare the clown to a shopping
Speaker 1: mall Santa, Right, they're kind of equally terrifying and scary
Speaker 1: to children, Like, how many times have you seen a
Speaker 1: little kid forced to sit in Santa's lab at the mall?
Speaker 1: It's just screaming, just absolutely upset. My nephew has done
Speaker 1: this so far every time my sister takes him to
Speaker 1: go see Santa. Um. So this I think speaks to
Speaker 1: the idea right that the age of clowns is over
Speaker 1: and is maybe just weirder to us than it used
Speaker 1: to be, because as far as Santa's go, there's certainly
Speaker 1: plenty of creepy Santa imagery out there, plenty of horror
Speaker 1: films at cre that employ a killer Santa, mutant Santa, monster, Santa,
Speaker 1: you name it. Yeah, yeah, there's probably more than clowns. Actually, yeah.
Speaker 1: But it's resilient to this kind of shift because we
Speaker 1: still culturally put a lot of value on it, and
Speaker 1: we and we refuse to give up the wholesome vision
Speaker 1: of Santa uh for the sake of this unwholesome with
Speaker 1: the clowns. We weren't willing to main tane what was sacred.
Speaker 1: So you want to take a break and then when
Speaker 1: we get back, we can come back to we can
Speaker 1: get past this clown stuff. And we can get into
Speaker 1: the real nitty gritty of the science breakdown of Pennywise. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. So what about Pennywise can't be explained by
Speaker 1: science because, let's be honest, there's a lot of weird
Speaker 1: stuff going on in these stories. Yeah, it's it's difficult
Speaker 1: with with it because we're essentially talking about a magical
Speaker 1: creature from outside of our world. Um, and also it
Speaker 1: has psychic abilities that are also beyond our reality. However,
Speaker 1: it does have to work in our world. It has
Speaker 1: to interact with our world. It's engaging physically, into some
Speaker 1: degree biologically with biological organisms. So we can derive I
Speaker 1: think a number of biological parallels here. We can, we
Speaker 1: can even get a little fringe at times, but I
Speaker 1: think we just have to keep an eye out for
Speaker 1: times when we're uh, you know, waiving the cudgel of
Speaker 1: science after you know, imaginary monsters. Right. Yeah. I do
Speaker 1: have to say though, after doing the research for this,
Speaker 1: I was surprised at how well Stephen King's uh like
Speaker 1: taxonomy of Pennywise fit into actual biological theories, to the
Speaker 1: point that it made me wonder if he had done
Speaker 1: like a lot of research along those lines, or if
Speaker 1: it was just sort of common sense, for instance, like predators,
Speaker 1: like how how actual predators act in the wild. Well,
Speaker 1: this is something I think about a lot when I
Speaker 1: do you know, monster science, bounce for the week, stuff
Speaker 1: for stuff to blow your mind, and that's that you
Speaker 1: have these fantastic creatures and then you find all these
Speaker 1: biological parallels. So you ask yourself, how did this happen? Yeah?
Speaker 1: Is it in situation where somebody sat down and planned
Speaker 1: it all out? I mean sometimes a creator is really
Speaker 1: you know, clued into the scientific data out there. Other
Speaker 1: times I think it's just this is the world we know,
Speaker 1: This is what we assume bowle things out of, and
Speaker 1: it matches, It ends up matching those forms in the
Speaker 1: you know, in the same sense that one as symbols
Speaker 1: a chimera out of existing animals. You kind of do
Speaker 1: that on a subconscious level. But then also I think
Speaker 1: it just comes down to the just the utter weirdness
Speaker 1: and and the amazing nous of the natural world that
Speaker 1: no matter how weird our imagination is, no matter just
Speaker 1: how fantastically creative, Uh, this monster is that we dream up,
Speaker 1: the natural world is gonna have as beat. Like that's
Speaker 1: just how weird and wonderful um our our world of
Speaker 1: biology is. Yeah, I mean, I can't list all of
Speaker 1: the episodes that we've done on natural organisms that are
Speaker 1: just like utterly crazy compared to anything I've ever seen
Speaker 1: in a horror movie. I'm talking a lot of like
Speaker 1: the underwater creatures we've covered, like the osadax bone worm
Speaker 1: or the hydra stuff like that. Oh yeah, And in fact,
Speaker 1: we'll be coming back around to some marine examples that
Speaker 1: line up with various functions, uh of of its anatomy.
Speaker 1: But first tell me this, So it lives in a sewer?
Speaker 1: What other what other creatures that live in a sewer?
Speaker 1: Does it have parallels with? Well, I mean you can
Speaker 1: look at it two different ways, right, because they are
Speaker 1: numerous examples of troglozines. Uh. And these are you know,
Speaker 1: creatures that that live underground, but they don't completely finish
Speaker 1: out their life cycle there. They have to you know,
Speaker 1: come up for something in the case of of it
Speaker 1: it comes up to eat in order to hunt at
Speaker 1: any rate. Uh. So you have various subterranean creatures that
Speaker 1: line up there, and indeed you have subtraining creatures that
Speaker 1: live in a guano rich environment. Uh as with the
Speaker 1: environments where the cave is filled with bat guano and
Speaker 1: yet lives in a sewer. On the other hand, you
Speaker 1: have a number of species that are very well adapted
Speaker 1: to artificial human made subterranean systems, rats, fleas, and of
Speaker 1: course mosquitoes, which we've talked about on the show here
Speaker 1: in terms of the London mosquito, which is seems to
Speaker 1: be diverging from the surface mosquito by virtue of its
Speaker 1: life underground. And then coming back to that whole extreme
Speaker 1: excrement thing as well. I mean, you have everything from
Speaker 1: say a dung beetle to the African penguin depend on
Speaker 1: feces for their life. So it's not something that I
Speaker 1: think King really got into in the books or or
Speaker 1: shows up in the movies at all. But you know,
Speaker 1: it's not completely unrealistic to say that you would have
Speaker 1: this strange creature that lives in such close confines with
Speaker 1: with human excrement, human waste. Yeah, that does make sense.
Speaker 1: I'm trying to remember from all three iterations, there's no
Speaker 1: moment where they really address that beyond just and this
Speaker 1: is in the trailer for the new movie where they
Speaker 1: talk about gray Water and what gray water is, and
Speaker 1: and uh, just the idea of them trapesing around in
Speaker 1: this dirty water throughout the entire time that they're down there.
Speaker 1: But yeah, there's no point where like, there's nothing scatological.
Speaker 1: I think it's it's a suitably foul place for a
Speaker 1: foul creature to live. But it seems to have other
Speaker 1: benefits to it besides what it contains. Now, all right,
Speaker 1: this maybe a spoiler, although I think like for this
Speaker 1: the length of this story, this is just kind of basic,
Speaker 1: uh role playing game rules of how it operates. Right.
Speaker 1: So it's a periodic predator, right right, Uh, Yeah, one
Speaker 1: of its most notable features is it has for starters
Speaker 1: a ridiculously long life life span. And then as far
Speaker 1: as this life cycle goes, it has these twenty seven
Speaker 1: to thirty year hibernation periods. So it comes out, it eats,
Speaker 1: and then it goes away for seven to thirty years
Speaker 1: and then comes back again. And in the book, in
Speaker 1: the show, it's been doing this since the mid eighteenth
Speaker 1: century when people first started living in the dairy area. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's right, Like there's there's always these incidents, these horrific
Speaker 1: incidents that precipitate it's a hunting period, right. So, like
Speaker 1: they've got one where it's I think it's called the
Speaker 1: Bradley Gang. They're like a bank rob regang. There's this
Speaker 1: huge massacre with them, and then twenty seven years after that,
Speaker 1: you've got the fire at the Black Spot where like
Speaker 1: a lot of people died in this horrible fire. So
Speaker 1: the thing is lengthy hibernation periods like this and not
Speaker 1: completely out of keeping with the natural world. You have
Speaker 1: thermophilic bacteria that may hibernate for up to a hundred
Speaker 1: million years before they're swept from chilling depths to hot
Speaker 1: spots of geothermic activity. And that's exactly the sort of
Speaker 1: sleep cycle that even a you know, a billion year
Speaker 1: old creature like it can probably appreciate. Now. Hibernation, of course,
Speaker 1: is a way for an organism to ratchet down energy
Speaker 1: expenditure and survive on energy reserves in order to survive
Speaker 1: periods of otherwise lethal resource depletion or environmental change. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's actually a pretty interesting mathematical model that we
Speaker 1: can turn to here to try to understand that system
Speaker 1: a little better. It's called predator prey modeling, and it's
Speaker 1: when you take equations to show a system in place
Speaker 1: between a predator species like it and a prey speech
Speaker 1: She's like the children of dairy main uh. And this
Speaker 1: form of math helps predict how these species will interact,
Speaker 1: especially when one is the primary food source for the other.
Speaker 1: So the famous example that's been used in this is
Speaker 1: a relationship between wolves and moose on Isle Royale in
Speaker 1: Lake Superior. It's been studied since the nineteen fifties because
Speaker 1: first of all, there's very little food for the wolves
Speaker 1: to eat other than the moose on this aisle, and
Speaker 1: second of all, the aisle itself is geographically isolated, which
Speaker 1: limits other factors that would come into play, like, for instance,
Speaker 1: hunting or migration. Now it's worth pointing out here just
Speaker 1: because this this comes up a little bit here and
Speaker 1: comes up later on. But for all intents and purposes,
Speaker 1: it is stuck in dairy like. It does not seem
Speaker 1: capable or willing to move to another area. It was
Speaker 1: happy to just sit there and wait for people to
Speaker 1: come to it. And I think this model may help
Speaker 1: us figure that out a little bit. So the most
Speaker 1: famous of these equations is called the Latka Voltaire system,
Speaker 1: and it's aimed after the scientists who came up with it.
Speaker 1: Latka argued that you can apply physical principles to biological systems,
Speaker 1: and this was part of his broader work in this
Speaker 1: book called The Elements of Physical Biology. Vol Terra was
Speaker 1: a physicist who was trying to help his son in
Speaker 1: law actually with a biology problem, and subsequently he ended
Speaker 1: up working on the interactions of species, searching for a
Speaker 1: mathematical theory of evolution. So this whole thing comes together.
Speaker 1: Usually these equations boiled down to representations of the change
Speaker 1: in a prey population versus the change in a predator population.
Speaker 1: We saw something similar when we did that episode on
Speaker 1: Zombie Math last year, which may have been one of
Speaker 1: our October episodes I can't remember. But without getting too
Speaker 1: far into the weeds on the math, each equation essentially
Speaker 1: uses the following form birth function minus death function. Now,
Speaker 1: in the ile royale example, the model looks like this.
Speaker 1: In the absence of predators, the prey should increase at
Speaker 1: a rate that is proportional to the current quantity of
Speaker 1: the prey. Basically, what this means is the more moose
Speaker 1: there are around to mate with each other without being hunted,
Speaker 1: the more calves are going to be born, but in
Speaker 1: the absence of prey, the predators should die off at
Speaker 1: a rate that is proportional to the current predator population.
Speaker 1: So if there are more wolves and they eat all
Speaker 1: the moose and there's no more moose to eat, the
Speaker 1: wolves are going to start to starve. So Latka argued
Speaker 1: that prey should decrease and predators should increase at rates
Speaker 1: that are proportional to the product of the prey times.
Speaker 1: The predators, or alternatively, the moose deaths should be related
Speaker 1: to the interaction of the wolves and the moose, as
Speaker 1: should the wolf births, so since then they will need
Speaker 1: plenty of moose for food to have healthy pups. Right.
Speaker 1: Either way, there's this relationship between the predator population and
Speaker 1: the prey population. Too many prey results in more predators,
Speaker 1: who then swamp the prey, which then subsequently called as
Speaker 1: a decrease in their population. This would lead to the
Speaker 1: predators dying out in the whole cycle beginning again. Now
Speaker 1: let's apply this to the it Pennywise example. Okay, there's
Speaker 1: far more prey than there are predators since there's only
Speaker 1: one Pennywise that's going around and eating children, So this
Speaker 1: should mean that there will be a proportional increase in
Speaker 1: the population of human children, which there is as far
Speaker 1: as we can tell. When we see the history of
Speaker 1: Dairy the town gets bigger and bigger every time there
Speaker 1: are these twenty seven year gaps. Pennywise as big as
Speaker 1: fear then should be that it itself will run out
Speaker 1: of children to eat, which is probably why it hibernates
Speaker 1: every twenty seven years. Ultimately, this assists it so it
Speaker 1: doesn't starve to death or subsequently it would have to
Speaker 1: leave its layer for the rest of the broader unknown
Speaker 1: territory of the rest of the world. Right, we don't
Speaker 1: know why it never leaves the sewers of Dairy, Right Theoretically,
Speaker 1: I guess it could just like rampage around all of
Speaker 1: them Erica and eat everything in its wake. But eventually
Speaker 1: it would probably be discovered and taken down. Yeah, or
Speaker 1: we just presume that it it cannot move for some
Speaker 1: reason or another. So what if Pennywise, though, were to
Speaker 1: somehow give birth to more monstrosities, It may then face
Speaker 1: difficulties feeding this brood if there isn't enough food available
Speaker 1: to it. So perhaps this is why Pennywise allows the
Speaker 1: dairy population to grow in these waves every twenty seven years,
Speaker 1: so when it has children itself, there will be more
Speaker 1: than enough to eat for its entire family. But it's
Speaker 1: worth noting that Dairy's population isn't hunted by anything else,
Speaker 1: and it has the capability of migration, right, So this
Speaker 1: is a lot more complex of a food system than
Speaker 1: we see on this aisle with the wolves and the moose.
Speaker 1: So I think there has to be something else going
Speaker 1: on here, possibly psychological, and maybe we'll talk about this
Speaker 1: later in the episode that keeps the people in Dairy
Speaker 1: so that food is always available every time Pennywise wakes up. Now,
Speaker 1: the scariest pragmatic rule about these predator prey models is
Speaker 1: this quote. Predators are always hungry and eat the same
Speaker 1: proportion of prey no matter how large the number of
Speaker 1: prey gets. So this implies no matter how big Dairy gets,
Speaker 1: Pennywise is always going to eat dozens of kids every
Speaker 1: twenty seven years, and that I think is part of
Speaker 1: what is so ultimately terrifying. Yeah, now here's a here's
Speaker 1: another reason to vanish for such long periods of time
Speaker 1: in between meals to counter anti predator adaptation. Okay, So,
Speaker 1: so think about it. Periodical cicada's come up from time
Speaker 1: to time and reference to it. They come up in
Speaker 1: the movie, and I presumably came up in the book
Speaker 1: as well. There's been a while. Uh. These are highly
Speaker 1: successful insects that are also prey species, and they spend
Speaker 1: most of their life cycle underground, only emerging in massive
Speaker 1: broods in order to overwhelm the predators. Predators have a
Speaker 1: feeding frenzy. They grow fat, but they can't eat everyone.
Speaker 1: That's the that's the basic cicada way. And then after
Speaker 1: that that feeding frenzy, they disappear for seven thirteen seventeen years.
Speaker 1: These are all prime numbers, by the way, before they
Speaker 1: emerge again and again, you know, just overpower the predators
Speaker 1: with sheer numbers. And the theory here is that the
Speaker 1: prime numbers involved keep the predators from receiving periodic population
Speaker 1: boost by synchronizing their own generations to divisions of the
Speaker 1: cicada's emergence period. This guy is according to a two
Speaker 1: thousand one paper in Complexity Journal by Goals, Shoels and
Speaker 1: Marcus titled prime number selection of cycles in a predator
Speaker 1: prey model. Okay, okay, so then so the theory applied
Speaker 1: here then would be that it is doing something similar.
Speaker 1: It's trying to uh only have periodic population boosts by
Speaker 1: synchronizing its generations. But as far as we know, it
Speaker 1: hasn't had an eight children yet. Uh correct, So yeah,
Speaker 1: it's it's not really a you know, a one to
Speaker 1: one comparison, because one is a model of of of
Speaker 1: of prey species dealing with predators, as a predator that
Speaker 1: is hibernating in order to maximize its utilization of the prey.
Speaker 1: And then the other factor here is that it's dormacy
Speaker 1: years may or may not be prime. It kind of
Speaker 1: depends how you you cut it. Twenty seven is a
Speaker 1: popular number, especially in the movie, but I've also seen
Speaker 1: it described as a twenty seven to thirty year dormacy,
Speaker 1: so it could be prime. Uh. Perhaps it's periodic slumber
Speaker 1: isn't just about allowing the herd to regrow, but also
Speaker 1: to prevent human populations of dairy from adapting to its cycle.
Speaker 1: Uh or and of course to prevent at least cultural
Speaker 1: anti predator adaptations. You know, certainly it's not really enough
Speaker 1: time for any kind of evolved biological adaptation, but there
Speaker 1: could be that could theoretically be enough time for people
Speaker 1: to develop new strategies, new ways of living, or you know,
Speaker 1: or just leaving and you know, go over to Castle Rock.
Speaker 1: They seem to have a lot easier. Yeah. I don't
Speaker 1: know though, I think we'll get into this later, But
Speaker 1: it seems like there's something else going on with the
Speaker 1: either the biology of it or the ecosystem of dairy
Speaker 1: that is keeping people there, and they seem to have
Speaker 1: just clouded over the idea that there's this monstrous predator
Speaker 1: in their midst. One more note about the hibernation. It
Speaker 1: should point out that hibernation among carnivores is largely the
Speaker 1: domain of reptiles and anthropods, and in these cases it's
Speaker 1: it's about annual avoidance of cold or temperatures. Now we
Speaker 1: might point to the fact that it seems to come
Speaker 1: out in the summer. I mean, certainly the movie takes
Speaker 1: place in the summer. Uh, But then it disappears for
Speaker 1: so many years that it doesn't seem to really be
Speaker 1: dependent upon temperature if I remember correctly. The timeline I
Speaker 1: think is supposed to be something like the first attack,
Speaker 1: which is Orgy, is in like October, and then months
Speaker 1: pass and then summer starts up and that's when it
Speaker 1: really heats up. Yeah. So this is another case where
Speaker 1: the biology and the fantasy don't really line up that well,
Speaker 1: and we're kind of swinging that science cudgel at ghosts again.
Speaker 1: So the thing that I think a lot of and
Speaker 1: I noticed there's a video online about this that a
Speaker 1: lot of other you know, science communicators are trying to
Speaker 1: tackle with the science of it, is the shape shifting aspect,
Speaker 1: because there's lots of as we've discussed with many of
Speaker 1: our weird creatures on the show, animals that are able
Speaker 1: to change their shape to survive and hunt. Yeah. Yeah,
Speaker 1: everybody loves a good shape shifting monster, right. Uh. The
Speaker 1: thing is true, shape shifting is difficult to come by
Speaker 1: in the natural world, and certainly if you look at
Speaker 1: it and it has this, you know, the additional here
Speaker 1: of psychic and hallucination aided versions of itself, it becomes
Speaker 1: even more impossible. Now, evolution certainly produces various versions of mimicry,
Speaker 1: and yet does use this as was the initial as
Speaker 1: with the initial Pennywise scene, you know, taking the form
Speaker 1: of something to attract prey. But we're talking about a
Speaker 1: gradual process and not something that can be really mixed
Speaker 1: up in real time. However, the version we see in
Speaker 1: the book and film is a deceptive feat reminiscent of
Speaker 1: the mimic octopus, which can contort its body, size, color,
Speaker 1: and texture to mimic such diverse species as lionfish, sea snakes,
Speaker 1: sting rays, sea an enemies, and jellyfish, and and also
Speaker 1: like yet, the mimic octopus also assumes the behavior and
Speaker 1: movement of its target in addition to its mirror appearance.
Speaker 1: So this provides one of I think the finest examples
Speaker 1: of shape shifting in nature, at least in so far
Speaker 1: as it matches up with our our, our fantastic notions
Speaker 1: of shape shifting. Yeah, there's a lot of interesting stuff,
Speaker 1: especially in this new version of the film with the
Speaker 1: shape shifting in like how it uses the shape shifting to,
Speaker 1: for instance, um move differently or squeeze through spaces and
Speaker 1: things like that. You can get a lot of that
Speaker 1: in the old movie, for instance, because there was sort
Speaker 1: of this idea that it had more of a established
Speaker 1: form that was hiding down in the sewers and that
Speaker 1: everything else were just hallucinations. But in the film version,
Speaker 1: I get the impression that it's more like it's a
Speaker 1: shape shifting thing that's capable of creating your worst fear
Speaker 1: through its shape shifting by psychically scanning you. Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then again it kind of breaks down when you start
Speaker 1: looking scene to scene because certainly there are some key
Speaker 1: shape shifting scenes in the movie where it all feels
Speaker 1: very biological and organic, But then you know it's also
Speaker 1: like crawling out of a projector screen. That's right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there's no there's no like rational way that that
Speaker 1: works within the laws of our universe. Yeah. That definitely
Speaker 1: struck me as being more along the lines of like
Speaker 1: a hallucination. Yeah. Alright, So one more thing I want
Speaker 1: to touch on here, and that is the dead lights,
Speaker 1: the dead lights showing up, especially in the film. You
Speaker 1: see it in the scene it opens its my mouth
Speaker 1: real wide and you see these these three pinpoints of
Speaker 1: of hellish light that transfix the prey. And you know,
Speaker 1: this is another area where we have to be careful
Speaker 1: chasing magic with that, with that, with that cudgel of science,
Speaker 1: but especially as we see in the movie, it uses
Speaker 1: these things to subdue a victim or drive them mad.
Speaker 1: And here in the natural world, we certainly have creatures
Speaker 1: with biolumin essence, and some of them do use their
Speaker 1: dazzling lights offensively against prey. Now, not all of them
Speaker 1: directly apply here, but considered the famed angler fish, which
Speaker 1: is just an endlessly fascinating and monstrous creature. The female's
Speaker 1: dorsal spine protrudes out over its mouth like a fishing
Speaker 1: pole with a fleshy luminous thanks to a symbotic bacteria
Speaker 1: lure that attracts prey into swallowing distance. And then we
Speaker 1: return to the cephalopods because the cuttle fish has been
Speaker 1: known to manipulate its chromataphors that's the little UH elements
Speaker 1: and its skin that you know, can manipulate color and
Speaker 1: and all. It can use these to dazzle the intended
Speaker 1: prey long enough to snatch it up, essentially hypnotizing it
Speaker 1: or confusing it with a pulsating psychedelic display. And they're
Speaker 1: they're particularly adapted just because their skin possess Their skin
Speaker 1: posesses up to two hundred chromatophores per square millimeter, allowing
Speaker 1: for complex mating displays, but also this sort of predatory behavior. Man,
Speaker 1: I love a good cuddlefish video. There's nothing like watching
Speaker 1: a cuddlefish video on YouTube or something like that. Like,
Speaker 1: they are endlessly fascinating anytime I've ever seen them in
Speaker 1: an aquarium. They just Actually the Chattanooga Aquarium was where
Speaker 1: I first saw one, and uh, I this actually inspired me.
Speaker 1: Like a decade ago, one of the first comics I
Speaker 1: ever wrote included a submarine that was modeled after a
Speaker 1: cuddle fish, and it included, uh, they like added this
Speaker 1: this fake skin with chromatophors into it so they it
Speaker 1: could blend in with its surroundings. Yeah. Yeah, we we
Speaker 1: should really come back and do uh do a new
Speaker 1: episode on cuttle fish. We have I think we have
Speaker 1: an older episode on them, but there's They're always there.
Speaker 1: They get a lot of scientific at tensions, so I'm
Speaker 1: sure there's new areas we could touch on, and they're
Speaker 1: just always deserving of study. Absolutely, So let's take another
Speaker 1: break and when we get back, we're going to get
Speaker 1: into its diet, which seems to be composed of fear. Alright,
Speaker 1: we're back. Yeah. So I actually was talking to my
Speaker 1: friend Dave Streepy about all this because he's he's a
Speaker 1: huge Stephen King fan. He also reread the book this
Speaker 1: year and he's seen the movie a couple of times.
Speaker 1: I was asking him, like, well, what's the deal? Refresh
Speaker 1: my memory about about it? And it's diet And it
Speaker 1: does seem to be a situation where it consumes fear
Speaker 1: or possibly consumes some flesh that's been seasoned by fear,
Speaker 1: or it only feeds on fear and only but it
Speaker 1: but it consumes flash because that's what monsters do, that's
Speaker 1: what children expect a monster to do. Yeah. Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: not entirely clear, but I think you've hit on the
Speaker 1: possibilities here, and I think that maybe what's going on
Speaker 1: here is related to fear conditioning as we know it
Speaker 1: in the psychological discipline. So I'm gonna see if we
Speaker 1: can connect it here now. If you're unfamiliar, fear conditioning
Speaker 1: is a simple form of associative learning. This is where
Speaker 1: an animal learns to associate the presence of something that's
Speaker 1: a neutral, conditioned stimulus and something like a light or
Speaker 1: maybe a tone, with the presence of a motivationally significant
Speaker 1: stimulus that is unconditioned, such as being electrocuted. This is
Speaker 1: usually what they do is they electrocute a mouse, uh,
Speaker 1: and they play a sound or they flash a light
Speaker 1: at it beforehand, so that eventually this creates the classic
Speaker 1: Pavlovian behaviorism style psychology, in which the fear memories are
Speaker 1: consolidated over time aims such that they can be induced
Speaker 1: by presenting the conditioned stimulus on its own, so that
Speaker 1: every time you flash the light or you play the sound,
Speaker 1: then the mouse or the rat is scared of that,
Speaker 1: and that you don't even have to electrocute it anymore. Well,
Speaker 1: you know, speaking about going to the movie theaters, I
Speaker 1: wonder to what extent the popcorn and coke is like that,
Speaker 1: because I see people get the giant coke, the giant
Speaker 1: popcorn and they go into the theater to watch, you know,
Speaker 1: something like Alien Covenant, and I'm like, why are you
Speaker 1: planning to eat and drink during this film? Um? Do
Speaker 1: you even want that overpriced popcorn and coke? Or is
Speaker 1: this just conditioning? Is this just a matter of this
Speaker 1: is what I expect, This is part of the experience.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah for me, like every time I get there,
Speaker 1: I just immediately start salivating sugar. Yeah, I think it's
Speaker 1: just a sugar fix um, which is probably related to
Speaker 1: my experience of going into a dark room. So all right,
Speaker 1: We know that Pennywise thrives on fear, so it's possible
Speaker 1: that the citizens of Dairy are experience dancing their own
Speaker 1: form of fear conditioning that then subsequently leads to mass
Speaker 1: psychogenic behavior. And we're gonna unpack the mass psychogenic behavior later.
Speaker 1: But over the centuries, Pennywise has conditioned them to both
Speaker 1: experience fear that subsequently feeds it and to also freeze
Speaker 1: in response to it, so they don't end up running
Speaker 1: away or migrating leaving. Yeah, I think that that's that's
Speaker 1: pretty solid. Not only critique would be how does how
Speaker 1: does its periods of inactivity affect that? Yeah, that's what
Speaker 1: I can't figure out either. And I'm trying to also
Speaker 1: understand what is the neutral stimuli that signals this to
Speaker 1: the people of Dairy, Right, there's no light, there's no tone.
Speaker 1: Is it these balloons that suddenly start popping up everywhere
Speaker 1: on the sewer grades or is it? Uh? Is it
Speaker 1: giving off some kind of pheromone throughout the entire city?
Speaker 1: That maybe that's why it lives in the sewer system.
Speaker 1: It's got access to all of the the grates that
Speaker 1: go up into people's homes. I'm not sure, but that
Speaker 1: is an interesting idea that there could be some additional
Speaker 1: biological component here. Now, remember, fear is our human defensive
Speaker 1: motivational system, and we evolved this way to protect ourselves
Speaker 1: from threats in our environment. We can measure fear as
Speaker 1: a complex constellation of behavioral and physiological responses. And we
Speaker 1: also know that fear conditioning itself is linked to the
Speaker 1: neurobiology of both learning and memory, So this is important.
Speaker 1: Is it possible that the system of fear in dairy
Speaker 1: is what prevents its residence from remembering or even learning
Speaker 1: about Pennywise in the first place, Like there's some kind
Speaker 1: of weird reverse fear conditioning going on here that makes
Speaker 1: it so they can't remember it. And then, in fact,
Speaker 1: fear conditioning is an ideal way for us to study
Speaker 1: how memory works in general, because a basic fear inducing
Speaker 1: event can determine the way our brains actually shape memories. Oh,
Speaker 1: if you go back and you look at the neural
Speaker 1: pathways through which a situation causes a creature to learn
Speaker 1: about fear, scientists actually hope that they can then figure
Speaker 1: out what the general mechanism of memory formation is. So
Speaker 1: hopefully by doing this they can better treat malfunctions and
Speaker 1: our ability to control fear. So for example, treatment of anxiety,
Speaker 1: phobias and panic attacks. Now I think with dairy residents,
Speaker 1: especially with the adults. So one psychological reality that comes
Speaker 1: to mind is a possible explanation is that of normalcy bias.
Speaker 1: And there are plenty of examples of humans who simply
Speaker 1: don't react appropriately to a sudden threat or even freeze
Speaker 1: up and are unable to act at all, or they
Speaker 1: freak out completely. I always go back to the Aliens
Speaker 1: example for this, So so think think too that the
Speaker 1: scene and Aliens where everything's gone hey wire. The Aliens
Speaker 1: have massacured, uh, the Marines. If this were a game
Speaker 1: of X Calm, you have gotten up poor rating and
Speaker 1: lost like all your crew. But mostly uh so you
Speaker 1: have Private Hudson and his whole thing is we're you,
Speaker 1: We're all gonna die man game over right. He's just
Speaker 1: hysterically running around. Yeah. Now, Lieutenant Gorman, I don't know
Speaker 1: if you remember him. I do. He's ostensibly supposed to
Speaker 1: be as the leader. Yeah, and he just panics and
Speaker 1: freezes up like he just can't he can't act. And
Speaker 1: then we have Hicks and Ripley, and they take the lead.
Speaker 1: They know how to act, They think rationally in the
Speaker 1: face of danger. Right, this is when Ripley like basically
Speaker 1: pushes Gorman out of the way and drives that that
Speaker 1: awesome tank thing in there and saves whoever is left. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The interesting thing is that this, uh, this, this kind
Speaker 1: of matches up with the various ways that people react
Speaker 1: to disasters. I was reading an article this is actually
Speaker 1: an I O nine by a writer esther English article.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, I like reading her stuff a lot, and
Speaker 1: she put she pointed out in her article that seventy
Speaker 1: of people in a disaster exhibit this, uh, you know,
Speaker 1: unusual Lotti da behator about ten to fiftcent freak out.
Speaker 1: You know, they go Private Hudson on everything, and then
Speaker 1: the other ten to they go the Ripley Hicks direction
Speaker 1: and they actually get stuff done. So in other words, uh,
Speaker 1: you know, they get the hell out of dodge. So
Speaker 1: the question people ask them is what's going on with that?
Speaker 1: Uh that seventy percent, you know why wind is seventy
Speaker 1: percent of people faced with, say, you know, a massacre
Speaker 1: by alien monsters or potentially um, you know, the steady um.
Speaker 1: You know, massacre of children by an extra dimensional shape shifter.
Speaker 1: And then the idea here is that you have to
Speaker 1: look at it two different ways. So seventy percent of
Speaker 1: people freezing and just kind of becoming doll people in
Speaker 1: the shape of face of danger, it could be a
Speaker 1: good thing because it means that that people who are
Speaker 1: in that state, they're gonna be docile. They can be
Speaker 1: directed through the chaos by others, so they can they
Speaker 1: can set there. Yeah, they're not really helping a lot,
Speaker 1: but they'll listen when Ripley says, hey, you need to
Speaker 1: go drive that tank. Interesting, I never thought about it
Speaker 1: that way before. I mean, you can certainly have it's
Speaker 1: you know, a burning building scenario for example. There's a
Speaker 1: downside because it means they need to be let out,
Speaker 1: that they might otherwise stick around too long and suffer
Speaker 1: for it. Well, Gorman certainly does end up lasting for
Speaker 1: quite a while until he ends up finally getting taken out. Yeah,
Speaker 1: well he has I think a moment of redemption he does.
Speaker 1: The downside here, of course, is that those that that
Speaker 1: that frees up, that that are unable to really grasp
Speaker 1: what's happening. Uh, they retard the progress of the ten
Speaker 1: to fifteen percent of people who are acting appropriate. Now,
Speaker 1: I'm not sure how he's slowing the rest of us down. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: even though they're the ones who need to be saved.
Speaker 1: I'm not sure exactly how this would would break down
Speaker 1: for the population of Dairy, But I think one of
Speaker 1: the one of the interesting things here is that since
Speaker 1: it is praying exclusively on children and adolescence, it's praying
Speaker 1: on individuals who have less of a say in what
Speaker 1: the culture is doing, what what the society of the
Speaker 1: town is doing. They're less a part of the decision
Speaker 1: making process, and they're going to have a harder time
Speaker 1: finding acceptance and belief when they tell their story to adults.
Speaker 1: So it doesn't it almost doesn't matter that you have
Speaker 1: that that ten to fifteen percent ideal. I guess the
Speaker 1: Losers Club from the movie and the books, they're the
Speaker 1: ten They're gonna stand up, but they can they can't
Speaker 1: do as much about it because they are cut off
Speaker 1: from the adult world. And you get the impression in
Speaker 1: all three versions of it that, regardless of what's going
Speaker 1: on with Pennywise, there's something wrong with this town in
Speaker 1: terms of adults just turning away from horrific acts. Right. Like, so,
Speaker 1: for instance, that scene that you see in the trailer,
Speaker 1: and this I believe was also in the mini series
Speaker 1: and is definitely in the book, is whenever they're the
Speaker 1: Losers club kids are getting harassed by the bullies, the
Speaker 1: adults just tend to turn the other way and go
Speaker 1: back indoors or or though like there's a scene where
Speaker 1: like they're driving by and they just look kind of
Speaker 1: casually and then just keep going like they very rarely
Speaker 1: stop and try to break it up. Yeah, and then
Speaker 1: in the in the same way that especially the book
Speaker 1: explores racism, homophobia, and other issues. It's it's very much
Speaker 1: a story. It's very much a work that says, hey,
Speaker 1: what what were some of the horrible things about the
Speaker 1: world that we grew up in? What was wrong with it?
Speaker 1: What didn't work? Uh, you know from on a social
Speaker 1: and cultural level. I mean in a way that's the whole.
Speaker 1: It's kind of symbolized with Pennywise, right, the symbol of
Speaker 1: childhood innocence that's corrupted by a darker force. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: think you just hit the nail on the head of
Speaker 1: like the strongest theme in the book that works so well,
Speaker 1: you know, why why we keep coming back to this
Speaker 1: one Stephen King's story over and over again. Now, one
Speaker 1: thing scientists have learned by experimenting on rats is let's
Speaker 1: think about the brain for a second. Here, Okay, the
Speaker 1: auditory cortex part of the brain isn't necessary if you
Speaker 1: want to fear condition a rat using audio. They've actually
Speaker 1: placed lesions on these rats brains, specifically in the auditory
Speaker 1: thalamus and the auditory midbrain, and they found that these
Speaker 1: lesions eliminated a rats susceptibility to conditioning. This is weird
Speaker 1: because we know that the nerve fibers of the auditory
Speaker 1: thalamus extend into the auditory cortex. They looked, the scientists
Speaker 1: and they found that fibers are also reaching out to
Speaker 1: several subcortical locations in the brain. Okay, and the major
Speaker 1: area where these are all located and that is affected
Speaker 1: by fear is the amygdala. And this has been considered
Speaker 1: the most important brain region when it comes to various
Speaker 1: forms of emotional behavior. So, if we're talking about fear
Speaker 1: here and and pennywise, either eating fear or creating fear conditioning,
Speaker 1: the amygdala seems to be where we want to look.
Speaker 1: They found that the central nucleus inside of the amygdala
Speaker 1: is the pivotal component of all of our fear conditioning circuitry,
Speaker 1: and this is because it provides connections to the various
Speaker 1: brain stem areas that are involved in controlling our spectrum
Speaker 1: of responses to fear. So the amygdala, and specifically it's
Speaker 1: lateral nucleus, is the sensory system interface when it comes
Speaker 1: to fear conditioning. By following this research, the scientists who
Speaker 1: have been looking at this and they've actually been able
Speaker 1: to map the entire stimulus response pathway in the brain
Speaker 1: from you know, basically whether that light goes on or
Speaker 1: there's a tone or you get electrocuted, to how it
Speaker 1: travels through the brain and essentially triggers your fierce response. Now,
Speaker 1: one thing I think that's worth thinking about here is
Speaker 1: that the book, in the films, I think they tend
Speaker 1: to work with sort of a non scientific idea of
Speaker 1: what fear is and how the mind works. But if
Speaker 1: we're to believe that it is psychic and perhaps also telekinetic,
Speaker 1: then perhaps it has the ability to manipulate this portion
Speaker 1: of the brain through some form of electromagnetic stimulation that
Speaker 1: could totally be it and then let's look. Let's drill
Speaker 1: down on the molecular level. It seems that emotional memories
Speaker 1: are established for us and stored through the amino acid
Speaker 1: transmitter glutamate. Okay, this is important. It's present in our
Speaker 1: cells and the ones that reach the lateral nucleus I
Speaker 1: was just referring to, and it's transmission is implicated in
Speaker 1: our memory formation. So likewise, some researchers have been able
Speaker 1: to totally block fear conditioning in animals by blocking the
Speaker 1: receptors they have for glutamate inside the amygdala. So this
Speaker 1: may explain what Pennywise is actually eating when it comes
Speaker 1: to fear, now, outside of any kind of uh I
Speaker 1: guess like transcendental idea of it eating the actual emotion
Speaker 1: in the air. Right, we know that when we experience
Speaker 1: fear there is neuro endocrime changes that include the rise
Speaker 1: of plasma prolactin, adreno, cortico tropin, corticosterone, and catacola mines.
Speaker 1: Maybe it's the increase in these chemical levels that are
Speaker 1: either satiating it or somehow attracting it. Right, So, like
Speaker 1: it is able to smell that fear somehow for lack
Speaker 1: of a better term. Well, one thing that comes to
Speaker 1: mind is that you could have a situation where, you know,
Speaker 1: it's a magical organism, so maybe it doesn't really need
Speaker 1: to eat in the way that the actual real world
Speaker 1: organisms do. But you could also have a situation where, yeah,
Speaker 1: it lives off of bacteria or you know, something in
Speaker 1: the waste waters of the dairy sewer, but it still
Speaker 1: needs a few key components that are only found in
Speaker 1: human brain chemistry, and this out of keeping with the
Speaker 1: natural world, because you do have certain organisms where some
Speaker 1: of their prey decisions are based on the very specific
Speaker 1: chemical needs. Yeah. Right, So then if that's true, what
Speaker 1: is pen Wise actually eating. Is it eating the amygdala?
Speaker 1: Is it eating the glutamate? We actually see it chewing
Speaker 1: on arms and all these kinds of things, right, But
Speaker 1: that seems that it's actually more for the purpose of
Speaker 1: generating fear based stimuli. It doesn't look like it's actually
Speaker 1: eating the arms. It's just kind of chewing on them
Speaker 1: to freak everybody out. Yeah, it's just doing what children expect,
Speaker 1: I'm monstered to do. Now you brought up other animals.
Speaker 1: Does Pennywise eat other animals other than human beings? I
Speaker 1: mean other animals experienced fear. It occurs nearly every animal group.
Speaker 1: You've got fruit flies, snails, birds, lizards, fish, rabbits, rats, monkeys,
Speaker 1: and of course people, all of them exhibit fear. Is
Speaker 1: it also scarfing down snails inside that sewer? No, I
Speaker 1: don't think so, because there's a whole bit where it's
Speaker 1: set there and waited until humans were available. Yeah. Uh.
Speaker 1: And then the mechanisms that fear operates are different in
Speaker 1: other creatures. But it seems at least that the pathways
Speaker 1: in mammals and possibly all vertebrates are very similar. So
Speaker 1: there's something specifically going on with humans. It seems in
Speaker 1: this something that we're creating that's different from the other
Speaker 1: mammals around dairy, that it could be scaring and picking off.
Speaker 1: So then all right, we've we've got all this. We
Speaker 1: seem to understand how it's eating, or what it's eating,
Speaker 1: at least, how it's creating fear. But what's up with
Speaker 1: the freezing? Why are the people in dairy just kind
Speaker 1: of you know, not acting. So fear conditioning, even if
Speaker 1: the motivationally significant stimulus isn't present, actually can lead to immobility,
Speaker 1: high blood pressure, and a faster heartbeat. So the actual
Speaker 1: freezing up seems to be the symptom the citizens of
Speaker 1: Dairy are exhibiting. But why is that. Well, it's an
Speaker 1: adaptation that allows them to decrease the probability of detection
Speaker 1: while also conserving energy. So somewhere deep in the back
Speaker 1: of these adults minds, they know there's something dangerous going
Speaker 1: on and they're desperately trying not to be detected by it. Well,
Speaker 1: this this comes back to normaltly buy us a little
Speaker 1: bit and the topic of psychogenic death. Um we haven't.
Speaker 1: We have an older episode that that covers that's off
Speaker 1: the link to that on a landing page for this
Speaker 1: episode of Stuff to Buy your Mind dot Com. But yeah,
Speaker 1: this gets into the area of say like a possum
Speaker 1: playing dead animals freezing up when threatened, and also going
Speaker 1: back to the amygdala and glutamate receptors. Remember that's all
Speaker 1: related to learning and memory, and there's a huge aspect
Speaker 1: in this story in that the kids who know about
Speaker 1: it forget about it, and the adults can't seem to
Speaker 1: form memories about it. So it seems like somehow there's
Speaker 1: something about brain formation going on here that allows the
Speaker 1: children to remember it. But maybe they're amygdalas aren't fully
Speaker 1: formed yet or something like that, and that is why
Speaker 1: they're able to be more conscious of the pennywise creature
Speaker 1: rather than the adults they're regardless of The amygdala isn't
Speaker 1: the only learning center of the brain, and it's an
Speaker 1: important component, but the entire network of the brain is necessary.
Speaker 1: I don't want to mislead our listeners by thinking, like, oh,
Speaker 1: the amygdala is like the one way that we learn
Speaker 1: or form memories. That this would basically be like saying
Speaker 1: like a car engine is the only part of a
Speaker 1: car that's necessary in order to drive somewhere. So we're
Speaker 1: all grown ups here, I mean, we know that all
Speaker 1: this talk of an extra dimensional organism that takes the
Speaker 1: form of a clown and kills our children is just
Speaker 1: completely unbelievable. As such, let's present a few alternate theories
Speaker 1: as to why a town like Dairy could seem to
Speaker 1: go bad and or just have this shared experience of
Speaker 1: this awful interloper. I remember when I was younger and
Speaker 1: I was having a hard time in school, like getting
Speaker 1: bullied and stuff like that, saying to my mom because
Speaker 1: I had read it saying there's something about this town.
Speaker 1: There's something it's like a Stephen King book. There's something
Speaker 1: wrong with the people. There's something bad about them. I
Speaker 1: wonder if there's something in the water. Yeah, this is
Speaker 1: we're thinking about. We're gonna get into possible things in
Speaker 1: the water here, because all right, if we're gonna analyze
Speaker 1: what's going on with Dairy, we have to we have
Speaker 1: to sort of identify it as something that can be,
Speaker 1: you know, more easily studied. So we might surmise that
Speaker 1: Dairy suffers from just a high crime rate. Certainly have
Speaker 1: all these murders, disappearances, etcetera. And the interesting thing here
Speaker 1: is that the crime is often grouped under the category
Speaker 1: of a wicked problem, which we've discussed about, a problem
Speaker 1: that is maybe not that easy to identify and then
Speaker 1: difficult to treat. Any any kind of large scale treatment
Speaker 1: changes the problem. It does certainly seem like in the
Speaker 1: narrative that even outside of Pennywise roaming around and hunting
Speaker 1: all these children, that Dairy is a pretty violent place
Speaker 1: to live. Yeah. Now, you might take, for instance, the
Speaker 1: high crime rate of New York City during the seventies
Speaker 1: and eighties and and the subsequent lowering of that crime level. Uh,
Speaker 1: and certainly key individuals and institutions were more than willing
Speaker 1: to take credit for that drop. But you you're you're
Speaker 1: left with a lot of different theories as to why
Speaker 1: we have this uh, this surgeon crime and then this
Speaker 1: decrease into crime, this this inverted you uh scenario. And
Speaker 1: you'll find theories relating to gun control, policing, prison sentencing,
Speaker 1: access to legal abortions, etcetera. But one of the possible causes,
Speaker 1: and one which I think is most interesting for discussion here,
Speaker 1: is pollution based and I think we might be able
Speaker 1: to apply it to dairy if we tweak it a
Speaker 1: little bit. So, Yeah, this guy, Carl Smith, the professor
Speaker 1: of Public Economics and Government of the University of North
Speaker 1: Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he defines crime as an epidemic.
Speaker 1: And he says, all right, if it is an epidemic,
Speaker 1: then you have to break down the spread of epidemics
Speaker 1: to determine their cause. So he says, all right, first question,
Speaker 1: does it spread along communication lines? If so, then it's informational.
Speaker 1: Does it spread along transportation lines, If so, then it's microbial.
Speaker 1: If it's everywhere at once, then it's probably a molecule. Now,
Speaker 1: horror action presents plenty of examples of these. Uh. You know,
Speaker 1: you can think of the curse of the Ring in
Speaker 1: the Mouth of Madness. These are straight up you know,
Speaker 1: informational uh, curses, informational contagions. Yeah, the medic in a way. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And that doesn't seem to be the case in Deary,
Speaker 1: right because the kids only later realize that they're seeing
Speaker 1: the same clown. So it's not like this idea that
Speaker 1: you tell the story of Penny Wise and it spreads.
Speaker 1: Now transportation lines, well, every disease or zombie horror movie
Speaker 1: gets into this and uh, and here in dairy, if
Speaker 1: it were transportation based. Uh. And if we limit just
Speaker 1: our study to the dairy area, then you could make
Speaker 1: a case for the water sewage system transporting it around. Yeah.
Speaker 1: And this is this comes up over and over again
Speaker 1: in all versions of it. This is where they end
Speaker 1: up finding the town maps and layering them on top
Speaker 1: of how the sewage system works, and where it all
Speaker 1: pops out. Yeah, and uh, I guess the only criticism
Speaker 1: there would be, well, hey, is is there really a
Speaker 1: safe place in dairy? Like certainly if you're close to
Speaker 1: that sewage line, and certain certain key locations you're in
Speaker 1: more danger. But I never got the sense that they
Speaker 1: were safe neighborhoods. No, I don't think so, because if
Speaker 1: you think about it, regardless of like how big the
Speaker 1: openings are to to the sewer system, if you live
Speaker 1: in any kind of abode that is connected to the
Speaker 1: sewage system, it has access to you, right like Beverly
Speaker 1: is able to hear it through just the hole in
Speaker 1: her sink. Ye. Now, all of this non dairy stuff
Speaker 1: that I've been discussing here about about the spread of
Speaker 1: some sort of an epidemic. This comes from a two
Speaker 1: thousand sixteen Mother Jones article titled lad America's Real Criminal
Speaker 1: Element by Kevin drum And he profiles the work of
Speaker 1: Rick Nevin, who who made the argument that gasoline lad
Speaker 1: may explain as much as of the rise and fall
Speaker 1: violent crime over the past half century. So Nevin here
Speaker 1: he'd worked on he'd worked for initiatives to to get
Speaker 1: lead paint out of homes uh due to the connection
Speaker 1: between lead exposure and small children and later life complications
Speaker 1: like lower i Q, hyperactivity, behavioral problems, and learning disabilities.
Speaker 1: So that The idea here is that lead emissions from
Speaker 1: tailpipes rose steadily from the early forties through the early seventies,
Speaker 1: nearly quadrupling. Then as unleaded gasoline began to replace leaded gasoline,
Speaker 1: emissions plummeted, all in an upside down you pattern that
Speaker 1: lines up with the rate of violence. Yeah, so he
Speaker 1: points out quote when differences of atmospheric lead density between
Speaker 1: big and small cities largely when went away, so did
Speaker 1: the differences in murder rates. Now, the exact culprit here
Speaker 1: would be tetra ethyl lead. But for this to work
Speaker 1: as adery theory, I think we'd need a continuous or
Speaker 1: at least fluctuating high level of of that lead in
Speaker 1: the local environment. Now, Deary was an iron working town
Speaker 1: where we're told, and I believe there's a textile industry
Speaker 1: there as well, so you could probably make some sort
Speaker 1: of case for a localized high level of atmospheric lead density.
Speaker 1: So this could possibly be why just Dairy's just like
Speaker 1: a mean town, even outside of the fact that there's
Speaker 1: an extraterrestrial shape shifting clown monster. Yeah. Yeah, and you
Speaker 1: know you can I guess you can sort of tease
Speaker 1: apart what the relationship between it's inherent vileness and the
Speaker 1: presence of this creature would happen to be. UM. Now,
Speaker 1: I wouldn't explain hallucinations of clowns obviously. For that you
Speaker 1: might look to UH to ergot poisoning, which we've we
Speaker 1: discussed in our LSD episodes and also in an older
Speaker 1: episode that Joe and I did, the Psychedelic Nightmare of Ergotism,
Speaker 1: and I'll leave everyone to check out that episode for
Speaker 1: a full explanation of of that. But we're talking ergot
Speaker 1: We're talking about one of the organic precursors of LST
Speaker 1: that acts as a parasite of grasses, including rye. So
Speaker 1: if you have contaminated rye and enough of it makes
Speaker 1: it into the local food supply, a town can experience
Speaker 1: the symptoms UH, certain symptoms that a rather nightmarish and
Speaker 1: horrific UH. In gangrenous argotism, we're talking black and appealing flesh,
Speaker 1: and in convulsive argantism you're talking like a nervous dyssunction,
Speaker 1: a feeling of the spiders are crawling on your body, seizures, hallucinations, mania,
Speaker 1: and psychosis, and accounts of this kind of poisoning go
Speaker 1: back as far as at least six BC in Assyria
Speaker 1: and continue on up to around n So, okay, those
Speaker 1: are some pretty good hypotheses for external stimulants that are
Speaker 1: causing this, right pollution, Maybe ergat what about something internal?
Speaker 1: What if it's psychological? So let's look at what's termed
Speaker 1: as mass psychogenic or mass sociogenic illness. This term is
Speaker 1: used in epidemiology to refer to the rapid spread of
Speaker 1: illness signs and symptoms affecting members of a cohesive group
Speaker 1: originating from a nervous to disturbance involving excitation, loss, or
Speaker 1: alteration of function, whereby physical complaints that are exhibited unconsciously
Speaker 1: have no corresponding organic set of causes. Now, this is
Speaker 1: thought to be related to conversion disorder, where symptoms like
Speaker 1: for instance, blindness, paralysis, and other neurological symptoms are caused
Speaker 1: by psychological conflicts, not physiological stimuli. So this could be
Speaker 1: used in the context of the actual credible threat that's
Speaker 1: provoking the anxiety. Is pennywise right. For instance, it goes
Speaker 1: along the lines that sometimes people get psychologically freaked out
Speaker 1: when they smell a noxious odor if they fear that
Speaker 1: they're going to be under some kind of chemical attack anyways.
Speaker 1: So what's interesting is that most physicians are less knowledgeable
Speaker 1: about this uh than they are in terms of like
Speaker 1: individual cases of hysteria. The actual like epidemic hysteria hasn't
Speaker 1: really become common knowledge in our medical fields yet. So
Speaker 1: this is despite over the fact that there are two
Speaker 1: hundred published accounts of mass responses to situations that involved
Speaker 1: either suspected poisonings or other events, and unfortunately the impact
Speaker 1: of such events is either under reported or underappreciated. So again,
Speaker 1: this could potentially explain what's going on in dairy why
Speaker 1: because it's difficult to recognize actual outbreaks of sociogenic illness
Speaker 1: because they're so diverse in nature. In fact, if you
Speaker 1: take a historical overview and you look at all of them,
Speaker 1: it tells us that the features of mass sociogenic illnesses
Speaker 1: tend to mirror popular social and cultural preoccupations that are
Speaker 1: defined by distinct eras for instance, alien abduction as we've
Speaker 1: we've recently talked about on the show. Or they could
Speaker 1: also reflect our unique social beliefs about the nature of
Speaker 1: the world. So maybe this is why Pennywise takes the
Speaker 1: form of a Clown right now, in the original novel
Speaker 1: this is all uh taking place in the fifties, right,
Speaker 1: and then again in the eighties, and the new films
Speaker 1: taking place in the eighties. Both of those I think
Speaker 1: fall pretty well within the era of the clown. Yeah
Speaker 1: I meanes was when I was watching Bozo the Clown
Speaker 1: on TV pretty regularly. Yeah me too. Now, mass psychogenic
Speaker 1: illnesses can actually be complex when stress gets built up
Speaker 1: and becomes chronic in an entire population. For instance, in
Speaker 1: regions where people live in constant fear of chemical weapons
Speaker 1: or maybe witchcraft, or you get these mass psychogenic events
Speaker 1: that can affect hundreds or even thousands of people at
Speaker 1: a time. And it can also be linked to physical
Speaker 1: illnesses that are muscular ticks, twitching, and shaking. Here's a
Speaker 1: quick example. In eight hundred children in Jordan believed that
Speaker 1: they had suffered from some kind of side effect of
Speaker 1: a tetanus, diphtheria toxoid vaccine that was administered in their school.
Speaker 1: Hundred and twenty two of them were admitted to a
Speaker 1: hospital at all, but the vast majority of these symptoms
Speaker 1: were actually psychological and not physical. So let's look at
Speaker 1: Pennywise as an example, perhaps the towns people of Dairy
Speaker 1: are experiencing a mass sociogenic illness and that they have
Speaker 1: lost the functional ability to care when harm is being
Speaker 1: done to their children. Their mass nervous system, if you
Speaker 1: want to call it, that appears to somehow be inhibited,
Speaker 1: and no one else outside of Dairy even recognizes this, right, Like,
Speaker 1: there's gonna be towns around Dairy, But because these outbreaks
Speaker 1: are so difficult to pin down, they don't recognize that
Speaker 1: there's anything wrong going on. So what's the credible threat
Speaker 1: though that's provoking their anxiety into apathy? Is it pennywise
Speaker 1: or is it pennywise getting by on their response to
Speaker 1: something else that's distinct to that era. Maybe it's the
Speaker 1: high crime rate that you were talking about earlier because
Speaker 1: of lead poisoning or something else. Subsequently, this anxiety can't
Speaker 1: be managed clinically because of how difficult it is to
Speaker 1: just identify the stimulus that's introducing it so you can
Speaker 1: then reduce it. It could potentially come down to those
Speaker 1: violent events that occur every twenty seven years, like we
Speaker 1: mentioned earlier. Right, you've got the black Spot burning down,
Speaker 1: the Bradley Gang rob robberies, the mass murders at the
Speaker 1: Dairy settlement when it was originally founded. All of these
Speaker 1: could have acted as triggering events that are causally related
Speaker 1: to the maladay, invoking anxiety and stress in the population
Speaker 1: and causing a temporary emotional detachment. So if all of
Speaker 1: this is sociogenic in origin, there may be other symptoms
Speaker 1: as well. For instance, I wonder if the people in
Speaker 1: Dairy are experiencing nausea or dizziness, or headaches or weakness,
Speaker 1: because these all seem to go along with such events.
Speaker 1: We do see a lot of lethargic adults, that is true. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and there is a big pharmacy. Uh so. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think the pennywise narrative actually works better in this nineteen
Speaker 1: eighties setting than it does in then eighteen fifties. Specifically
Speaker 1: because the child abuse kidnapping panic that was going on
Speaker 1: in the nineteen eighties it was super prevalent in that decade,
Speaker 1: So that would seem to be a predisposing factor that
Speaker 1: produces the sociogenic illness in the first place. Based on
Speaker 1: the historical shifts, you know, whether you've got these surges
Speaker 1: of violence going on every twenty seven years, and then
Speaker 1: you've got the fear and uncertainties that are preoccupying the
Speaker 1: citizens of Dairy to begin with, wouldn't it be crazy if,
Speaker 1: like everything that's happening in Castle Rock is just one
Speaker 1: percent legit. Everything is happening in Jerusalem's a lot legit,
Speaker 1: and even like the you know, the little bald doctors,
Speaker 1: Crimson King, all of that real. But it just causes
Speaker 1: everyone in Deary to have this uh, this mass um
Speaker 1: hallucination of none of them. Yeah, nothing is actually going
Speaker 1: on in Dairy, whether whether we're talking about it or
Speaker 1: any of the other Stephen King novels that take place there.
Speaker 1: Oh no, I say, everything else is happening in dear
Speaker 1: is happening, but it's just causing. It's causing everyone to imagine, Pennywise,
Speaker 1: that's an interesting explanation, I won't I wonder what Uncle
Speaker 1: Stevie would say to that. Yeah, you know what it
Speaker 1: does raise raise an interesting question, you know, because so
Speaker 1: much of our consideration of perceptions of the supernatural and um,
Speaker 1: you know, alternate century experiences. It's it's a situation where
Speaker 1: the fantastic becomes real due to real world stimuli. So
Speaker 1: if you have a world in which you have all
Speaker 1: of this real world stimuli that makes us see crazy
Speaker 1: things anyway and feel think crazy things anyway. If you
Speaker 1: had something that was actually supernatural and real, what would
Speaker 1: that do to the to the fraudulent cases? Yeah, exactly. Yeah,
Speaker 1: we have lots of examples. I'm not gonna drill through
Speaker 1: all of them here, but there's four or five examples
Speaker 1: in our notes here of cases that are very similar
Speaker 1: to this. You've got a cotton mill in Lancashire, England
Speaker 1: and seven where people were hysterical thinking that there was
Speaker 1: a disease that was contaminating cotton. In forty pupils at
Speaker 1: the Outwood Academy and Ripping, England had to be treated
Speaker 1: for dizzyness and nausea because they had a mass psychogenic illness.
Speaker 1: You had another instance in nineteen nine in Belgium, twenty
Speaker 1: six children from one school developed nausea, headache, fatigue, palpitations,
Speaker 1: all this stuff. They thought it was because of bottled
Speaker 1: Coca cola. It went so far Coca Cola themselves thought
Speaker 1: they might be responsible for the outbreak and they blamed
Speaker 1: it on bad carbon dioxide and possibly a fungicide that
Speaker 1: was applied to the transport palettes that the coke was on.
Speaker 1: Turned out all of it was psychological. And then my
Speaker 1: favorite example, and I wish maybe we should just do
Speaker 1: a whole episode on this because I have a ton
Speaker 1: of notes on this is the Pokemon panic example from seven.
Speaker 1: A lot of people remember this when there was that
Speaker 1: that phase where in Japan it was reported that like
Speaker 1: six hundred and eighteen child views were all experiencing these
Speaker 1: symptoms of nausea, shortness of breath, dizziness, headaches, etcetera. They
Speaker 1: thought there was like some kind of mass epileptic event
Speaker 1: going on because they were all watching Pokemon, and it
Speaker 1: turned out again they're pretty sure this was all psychological. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know that. Two of my favorite examples are our
Speaker 1: spring Hill Jack from nineteenth century London and the Mad
Speaker 1: Gasser of Mattun of Mattoon, Illinois, Int. Five and in
Speaker 1: in that case, it was the idea that there was
Speaker 1: a mysterious stranger going around gassing people with a gas gun.
Speaker 1: What if every town has a Pennywise in it, but
Speaker 1: you have to suffer a mass psychogenic event for Pennywise
Speaker 1: to be able to basically run around and do what
Speaker 1: it does. And so you've got the mad Gasser in
Speaker 1: this one town. You've got a clown in another town.
Speaker 1: You've got spring Hill Jack in another town. We just
Speaker 1: really need to keep it together. It's a franchise, and
Speaker 1: mostly most small towns out there have at least one
Speaker 1: statue of a clown at their local McDonald's restaurants. Okay, well,
Speaker 1: I think we've done a pretty exhaustive look at what
Speaker 1: could be going on, not just with penny Wise, but
Speaker 1: with the citizens of Dairy who just seemed to be
Speaker 1: strangely unaware of what's going on with their children getting
Speaker 1: eaten by a clown. Yeah. So, hey, if you have
Speaker 1: thoughts you'd like to share about the book, the miniseries,
Speaker 1: the motion picture, and of course our analysis here today,
Speaker 1: you can get in touch with us a number of
Speaker 1: different ways. First of all, hit us up on the
Speaker 1: social media. We're on Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Instagram, and on
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Speaker 1: you just have to know what the show is to
Speaker 1: get admitted and then you can have discussions with us,
Speaker 1: but also with other insightful fans of the show. And Hey,
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